The Complete Guide
to DOOH Analytics
How to use analytics to boost profits
and win more campaigns
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Introduction
As a digital out-of-home (DOOH) media network, you want you want to improve
advertising performance and profits. You want to charge premium fees. You
want to win more campaigns.
Now you can.
Modern technology enables you to measure DOOH performance to make
dramatic improvements. Analytics transformed online advertising, and it’s
about to do the same with DOOH.
If you’re curious about DOOH analytics but aren’t sure where to start, this
guide is for you: we’ll explain how analytics works, how it helps boost profits,
and how you can get started.
If you'd like to learn more about our platform, just contact me directly at
[email protected] to arrange how-to tutorials.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
Douglas Lusted
CEO and Co-Founder of LINKETT
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Table of Contents
1. What is DOOH Analytics?
4
2. How Can Analytics Increase Profits?
6
3. Starting with Primary Data
9
4. Measure Results with Secondary Data
13
5. Improve Results with Tertiary Data
20
6. Optimizing Ads in Real Time
25
7. Reporting Results to Advertisers
29
8. How to Get Started
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What is DOOH
Analytics?
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Let’s start with DOOH...
If you’ve been to a shopping mall, airport, or an office building, then you’ve
seen a digital out-of-home advertisement. This rich, dynamic content is
delivered via networked digital signage displays, and DOOH advertising is
expected to become a $45 billion industry by 2019.
So, why does DOOH need analytics?
According to PWC, In 2015 advertisers spent an estimated $10 billion on
digital billboard advertising, yet so many of them struggle to determine what
their ROI is, and a lack of data limits DOOH networks ability to compete with
other channels and bring in more advertisers.
Analytics are crucial to the advertising industry because they enable
advertising performance to be measured and improved. Online advertising
has platforms like Google AdWords, but until now DOOH has lacked a similar
platform.
It’s time for DOOH to join the 21st century. Other modern advertising
channels like search and social media use analytics to drive success, and
we believe that DOOH should too.
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How can analytics
increase profits?
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DOOH analytics increases profits in two main ways:
1. It enables networks to charge premium fees, because
advertisers are willing to pay for analytics.
2. It provides a competitive advantage over other
networks, making it easier to win more campaigns.
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1. Premium Fees
In DOOH, data has traditionally been collected
with old-school methods: manual surveys,
research groups, and the like. It takes a lot of
time and money to collect and analyze this
information, and by the time the results are
available, the campaign is finished – making
it too late to improve performance based on
the findings.
To solve these problems, DOOH networks are
now charging a premium fee to advertisers
for access to real-time analytics. Advertisers
are willing to pay for DOOH analytics, and
generally the fee is about 10-20% of the
total campaign budget, making analytics an
affordable part of any DOOH campaign.
2. Competitive Advantage
As demonstrated in the early 2000’s with
online advertising, once analytics started
to become a common standard, networks
started offering them for free in order to win
campaigns from competitors who didn’t.
Given the low price of implementing an
analytics platform vs the high revenue
potential from winning campaigns from
competitors, DOOH networks are now using
analytics purely to drive existing revenue
channels and increase profit margins through
additional campaign volume.
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Starting with
Primary Data
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What's primary data, and why is it important?
In order to get real-time analytics, consistent streams of high-quality data
must be available. Primary data is the core of DOOH, and without it no type
of data analysis or analytics is possible.
There are three kinds of DOOH primary data:
Content
Location
Time
What media is showing
on the screens.
What display(s) the
content is playing on
When the content
was played
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Where can you find primary data?
DOOH advertising networks use a Content Management System (CMS)
for their digital signage. Each CMS requires content, locations, and time
to develop playlists or schedules, and almost every CMS can export this
information.
Here’s what a typical primary data table looks like:
Content
Location
Time
Ad #1
Mall Display #1
Monday Sept 12
6:05pm - 7:00pm
Ad #2
Airport Display #5
Friday Sept 16
4:00pm - 4:45pm
Ad #3
Office Display #4
Sunday October 2
6:05pm - 7:00pm
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How can you use primary data with analytics?
In order for analytics platforms to be accurate and effective, they need realtime access to primary data streams from the CMS. This is done through a
simple, direct API integration, so that analytics platforms can start pairing
and sorting the data it collects by content, location, and time.
Primary data is the backbone of DOOH analytics – with it, we can collect and
analyze secondary and tertiary data, which we’ll focus on in the next two
chapters.
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4
Measure Results
With Secondary
Data
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What’s secondary data, and why is it important?
Secondary data is generated from consumer traffic and behavior near the
display, and is recorded through analytics platforms.
Secondary data is important because it enables the performance of content,
location, and time to be measured using these four stages: Impression,
Dwell Time, Engagement, and Conversion:
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Where to find secondary data
Secondary data is collected from people’s smartphones when they are near
a DOOH ad, and it’s stored in the DOOH network’s analytics platform. This
data is collected through internet-connected sensors, that passively gather
anonymous data from an audience in close proximity, and then send that
data to a cloud-hosted analytics platform.
Analytics platforms (LINKETT, for example) then turn the data into custom
graphs and charts to provide the key performance insights and indicators
used to measure and improve DOOH performance.
* It's important to note that there are no cameras in the LINKETT sensor,
but rather, it's Wi-Fi-enabled and can collect a unique, anonymous ID from
smartphones that pass by.
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How to use secondary data
Analytics platforms use secondary data to construct a key framework for
advertising performance measurement, known as The Advertising Funnel:
The advertising funnel illustrates the 4 stages of the consumers’ journey
relative to the DOOH advertisement. This funnel enables performance
ratings to be generated, so that DOOH performance can be measured and
improved.
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The 4 Ratings to Measure
By quantifying the DOOH consumer journey, a ton of data becomes available
to help you better understand how effective your content is. To make sense
of this data, we use these 4 key ratings:
Performance Rating =
Engagement Rating =
Conversions
Impressions
Engagements
Dwell Times
Retention Rating =
Conversion Rating =
Dwell Times
Impressions
Conversions
Engagements
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1. Performance Rating
The Performance Rating is most important, because
it determines overall performance of content,
location, and/or time slots. The Performance Rating
is calculated by taking the percentage of impressions
that become conversions. A strong Performance
Rating is approximately 1%.
1%
2. Retention Rating
The Retention Rating is percentage of impressions
that turn into dwell times. A strong Retention Rating
is approximately 50%. If there is no call-to-action, this
rating is commonly used to A/B test different content
to see what holds consumer interest the longest. The
higher the Retention Rating, the more likely it is that
consumers will remember, engage, and convert.
50%
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3. Engagement Rating
The Engagement Rating is the percentage of dwell
time that convert into engagements. A strong
Engagement Rating is 5%. For example, if you have 50
dwell times and an average of 3 of people respond to
your content, you have a strong Engagement Rating.
This rating is most often used as a way to test a call
to actions attractiveness – the higher it is, the more
effective your content is on driving action.
5%
4. Conversion Rating
The Conversion Rating is the percentage of
engagements that turn into a successful conversion.
Whether the conversion is app downloads, online
purchases, filling out a survey, or something else,
the Conversion Rating is a crucial indicator on how
effective your landing pages and other channels are
at getting people to convert on your offer.
33%
This dramatically varies, because it depends on many
factors like the user’s experience, copywriting, price
competitiveness, and overall demand for your offering.
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Improve Results
With Tertiary Data
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Getting started with tertiary data
We’ve covered the fundamentals of primary and secondary data in the
context of DOOH – but now we’d like to focus on one of the most exciting
opportunities in DOOH advertising: Tertiary data.
Tertiary data is the combination of primary and secondary data to better
understand consumers and deliver more targeted, personalized content to
them. It can only be found in DOOH analytics platforms like LINKETT.
Using tertiary data, advertisements can be tailored to specific profiles to
be more relevant, often resulting in higher performance. Tertiary data is not
mandatory to monitor performance, but rather, it’s used to improve it.
The two most common forms of tertiary data are:
Demographic & Historical
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Demographic
Historical
Demographic data is associated with an audience’s specific characteristics such as age,
gender, income, etc. However, if you store
demographic data and associate it to anything
trackable, you need to have the consumer’s
permission to do so through some form of an
“opt-in”.
Historical data helps generate new insights
like “campaign impression frequency”, which
uses content, time, and impression data to
determine how many times an audience has
seen your campaign, when they are likely to
convert, and when they start to lose interest.
Tertiary Demographic Data
Conversions by Ad Frequency
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Why is tertiary data important?
Tertiary data enables a major breakthrough in advertising: the ability to
change content on any DOOH display depending on who is standing in front
of it. This means that the DOOH industry can run real-time targeted ads, just
like online. For example, content will change depending on what locations
or websites you have been to previously, the number of times you have seen
an ad, what ads you have engaged with, and more. This makes your DOOH
advertising efforts more effective than ever before.
How to use tertiary data
In order to generate targeted advertising using tertiary data, your
analytics platform and CMS must be integrated via a two-way API.
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Content Triggers
To get the most from tertiary data, your CMS must be capable of real-time
content delivery and setting-up “triggers”. Triggers are predefined content
schedules, so that when the appropriate audience is detected in front of a
display targeted content can be triggered on the screen and replace what
other content was originally going to be played. Here are four common
examples of triggers:
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Optimizing Ads In
Real Time
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What’s optimization, and why is it important?
Optimization makes an ad perform as effectively as possible by using data
to adjust your campaign in real-time. This means taking action based on the
data analyzed, such as tweaking the content, locations, and time your ad is
shown to maximize performance.
This is one of the most best ways to use analytics – it enables you to play
the best content, at the best location, at the best time, generating the best
possible results for your advertising.
How to use optimization
There are three steps:
1. Analyze
2. Optimize
3. Experiment
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Analyze
Optimize
Experiment
Before you can optimize,
you first must analyze
your raw campaign data.
Launch your campaign
and do not make any
changes for a reasonable
period – in the DOOH
advertising industry, 1-2
weeks is a common test
period.
Based on your analysis,
adjust your campaign in
real-time and run content
that performed best at
each location and time
slot.
Once you have optimized
your campaign, the last
step is to run experiments
to try to continually
improve campaign
performance.
This is mostly a manual
process, but as artificial
intelligence improves,
automatic optimization
– where the best ads are
automatically played at
the appropriate time and
location – is bound to
become the future of
DOOH advertising.
For example, this could
include editing or adding
brand new content,
locations, or time slots to
develop new scenarios
that may outperform the
others.
Once the test period is
over, analyze the data to
determine what tweaks
need to be made in order
to achieve higher
performance.
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Here’s an example...
For any DOOH network that uses an analytics
platform and optimizes their content manually, this
is how the process would work:
In this scenario, we have 2 different ads, in 2
locations, playing in 3 different time slots each.
This is a total of 12 different possible scenarios.
After running a 2 week testing period, the DOOH
network finds that scenario 8 had the highest
performance rating at 1.5%.
This gives the advertiser a better understanding of
what content, locations, and time perform the best,
and they can use this data to continue testing and
improving their campaign in real time.
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Reporting Results to
Advertisers
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DOOH analytics enables you to give custom reports to advertisers
and prove you are measuring performance. Here’s how:
1. Online Dashboard
2. Email Reports
Some analytics platforms enable you to setup a new “user” with limited access, so they
can only see their campaign’s data. This
method is for hands-on advertisers who want
to measure and optimize their own campaigns
more than once a day.
DOOH networks can send custom reports
to advertisers on a daily, weekly, or monthly
basis. These reports are a summary of the
overall performance of their campaign, as
well as a performance breakdown of content,
locations, and time slots.
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How to Get Started
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Try the first 45 days free
Now that you understand the power of real-time analytics to transform your
advertising performance, we'd like to invite you to give it a try. Start a refundable
45-day trial with LINKETT, and try out analytics with your own digital signage.
If you have any questions or would like a demo of our analytics platform, you
can book a time that works for you here. We're always happy to chat.
If you have any additional questions about the content in this ebook or something
else, go ahead and call 1-844-546-5388 or email [email protected] anytime.
Thanks for reading!
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About the Author
Douglas Lusted is the CEO and Co-Founder of LINKETT, the analytics
platform for DOOH Advertising. Douglas’ expertise lie in adtech, big data,
and entrepreneurship, with an educational background from the University
of Waterloo and University of Toronto. Named as Forbes 30 under 30 since
the age of 19, Douglas continues to publish works in the ever evolving digital
signage industry. He currently resides in Mountain View, California and you
can connect with him on LinkedIn or email: [email protected].
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DOOH advertising and analytics?
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And if you'd like to talk with someone about
LINKETT and learn more about what we do,
email [email protected].
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